On a typical school day, Burnell Hall at Bridgewater State University is full of students studying or socializing in the lounge.

Seven years ago, when she was first back home after 18 months in Iraq, Julie Boucher would not have been able to handle it. She still gets anxious in a crowd.

But the 29-year-old has come a long way. She’s a mother now, to 6-year-old Christopher, and a student at Bridgewater State University.

She is also one of the leaders of an on-campus student veterans organization.

Boucher graduated from Plymouth South High School in 2001 and joined the Army Reserves.

She liked what she had heard about basic training and she wanted to get away.

“I wanted an adventure,” she recalled with a smile. She got it.

Boucher was a petroleum supply specialist with the 439th Quartermaster Unit out of Brockton. She was stationed in Iraq at a place called Camp Cedar and later at an air base in Tallil. She was one of 11 women on the base. There were 150 men.

She still struggles with some of the experiences she had in Iraq. Boucher said she was sexually harassed by some fellow service members.

It’s an all too common story in the military, particularly in places like where she was stationed, in the middle of the desert, she said.

“The longer you’re in that living situation, the more primitive people get,” she said.

Boucher was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when she returned home to Plymouth from Iraq. She attends weekly therapy sessions.

It was like “culture shock,” she said, to return home after 18 months away. “I remember the first time I woke up in my bed and it was like I didn’t belong.”

But now, she’s got many more positive things to focus on, including her “little angel” Christopher and her work with the student veterans group.

Boucher is vice president of the organization which she helped start last year to help students like her face the challenges of transitioning from military to student life.

There are about 350 students out of 12,000 at Bridgewater State who are going to school on the GI Bill.

Students who are also military veterans face similar challenges, said Grishelda Hogan, a social worker at the Brockton area VA hospital who teaches a course at Bridgewater State titled “Social Work practice with military members and their families.”

Getting through the enrollment process itself can be a struggle, she said.

That’s where the student veterans organization comes in. Right now, only about 20 of the 350 student veterans show up for meetings, Boucher said.

So this year she and others are trying to “just reach out.” Behind pushing for priority enrollment for soldiers, Boucher is also stressing the need for a meeting place to gather the troops, so to speak.

That way, veterans will be able to share resources and tools to help them through. For veterans, Boucher says, just making a doctor’s appointment can take six phone calls because of the federal benefits and bureaucracy involved.

The group is planning a host of activities that range from learning to write a military or government resume to inviting contacts from the American Red Cross Association to help train student veterans on how to deal with stressors of family and student life after returning home from combat.

While students like Boucher work through their individual struggles, Hogan is pushing for schools to catch up.

“Because of the number of students returning,” she said, “one of the major tasks local schools are faced with now is, ‘How do we help?’”

Sometimes all students need, she added, is a support structure.

“In order to serve, you need to be pretty resilient. So support is all they need, someone to listen to them,” Hogan said.